Film is not very good at inhabiting the diaphanous folds of fashion. Recent reports from Venice on A Single Man, Tom Ford’s directorial debut, suggest that fashion might make a slicker transition to film. In any case, while master photographers and designers routinely gesture towards the life outside the shot – the model mid-leap caught in a microcosmic motion picture, the aspirational silhouette that sells a metonymic life – even directors like Robert Altman (Pret-a-porter) can’t resist a certain celluloid reductio ad absurdum when it comes to fashion. Whether, as with Bruno, style is mere parodic wallpaper or, as with The Devil Wears Prada and Ugly Betty, the florid backdrop to a coming-of-age tale, mainstream film and television stumble on the “problem” of clothes, treating couture as a ludicrous visual remainder. As though there was a secret prohibition on direct touch, the only films to influence fashion are not about it: Liquid Sky, Blade Runner, Breakfast at Tiffany’s or manifold Marlene Dietrich vehicles.

R.J. Cutler’s documentary of life behind the covers of US Vogue is certainly not oblique. At the best of times it feels like editor Anna Wintour has endorsed a pre-emptive biopic strike against the naysayers, cementing her profile on the grounds not of aesthetics, but of good business sense. Unfortunately, in the filmic time lag between Vogue, 2007 (the run-up to the magazine’s largest ever September Issue) and 2009′s recession, it has become harder not to flinch as thousands of dollars worth of shoots fly out the window to the twitch of La Wintour’s discontent. On a personal level, however, this only re-enforces the formidable editor’s black appeal: her line in dismissive downward glances and lacerating one-liners makes her fictive doubles look like hysteric ingénues. No one plays Anna like Anna. Much of the film’s content and most of its humour derives from her fatigued attempts to deal with the avant-garde excesses and repetitious fetishes of her creative underlings. Eastern European models: so samey; Mario Testino’s equine concept for the Sienna Miller cover shoot: mmmm, but Anna wants the Coliseum money shot. It’s hard to resent a woman who is so uniquely gifted for the simultaneous harshness and whimsy of her habitat. But it’s also hard to completely root for her either.  

Doubly shielded from the plebs by Chanel and blacked out car windows, accessorized with Starbucks and deceptive floral twinsets, she is admittedly more of a star than her model pawns. But by the time her co-directors and corporate advertising cronies have finished with the soundbites, it’s a relief when her daughter gestures that there might be “something else” to life beyond what’s hot and what’s not. And so there is: after the syncopated irritation of the opening credits, the documentary makes an even-handed if inevitable attempt to probe the psychology behind the pout. What humanity there is here does not, however, belong to Wintour, but to creative director Grace Coddington. Less of a fool than extra large editor-at-large André Leon Talley, she nonetheless incarnates the same fidelity to fantasy that saves Vogue from descending into pure commerce. Sometimes it’s hard to see the difference between The War Room, the documentary of the political power-play behind Clinton’s ’92 presidential campaign, produced by Cutler, and Vogue‘s cutting room – Coddington’s romantic vision vying with Wintour’s cut-throat decisions. Sticking to his favourite template, Cutler’s attempt to transpose Clinton’s politic motto “it’s the economy, stupid” onto colour-blocking and Rococo never quite seems to hit the mark.

Business, however, can surely be the only reason why the visibly unimpressed directors suffer celebrities like Miller to grace their covers. Much is made of Vogue‘s early concession to the peculiar paradox of these figures with no innate style who are nonetheless required to embody and re-sell style. As the first editor to see the craze coming, Wintour has obviously ushered in something that fundamentally bores her. Those who aspire to Miller’s toothy appeal might then cringe to see the unsubtle redress the actress receives with her photoshop makeover. Still, at least she has a smile to go with her fillings. Once the familiar “banality/pleasure in shoes” paradigm has been subtracted from the equation, the art of fashion seems to consist in elegantly beating back the hollow tide of tills.

The September Issue is currently playing all over.